DLC Blog

The Business of Learning

SCHOOL"WORK"

Can you imagine how many hours you spend at school from Kindergarten to 12th grade? You probably spend more than 12,000 hours at school by graduation! On top of that, you spend countless hours doing homework, worrying about what to wear, sitting on the bus, applying to college...the list goes on!

Now can you imagine if you got paid for all those hours at school? That would be a great asset!

In business we talk about assets and liabilities. Assets are all of the money and resources that a person or an organization (like a school or business) has. Liabilites are all of your debts, or things you have to pay for. Schools must pay a lot of money to educate children. After all, that is their "business." But schools don't earn a profit. Federal, state, and local governments must all collect taxes in order to pay for the operation of schools. Remember, your teacher earns a salary for being at school. So does your principal, and so do the bus drivers and all the people who work to make schools great. Plus, your school has to buy a building and chairs and lots of books and test tubes (even more if you break them during science class)! But what if YOU got paid?

Federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour, but we live in the wonderful State of Washington where minimum wage is $7.63 an hour. BUT, if you are 14 or 15, you would earn 85% of minimum wage or $6.49 an hour. Minimum wage will increase to $7.93 on January 1, 2007, because Washington State's minimum wage goes up with inflation. Click here for our state's minimum wage information.

SOME FUN MATH

Anyhow, let's do a little business and payroll work, shall we? After all, if you ever operate a business you will probably have to pay your employees. Unless, of course, they work for free but I doubt that will be the case!

Let's say that you go to school 180 days a year from Kindergarten through 12th grade, which is 13 years. But, you only went half-time in Kindergarten so we will only count 90 days. We would do this math:

(12 years X 180 days) + (90 days) = 2250 school days

Now let's say that you missed about once every 15 class days (that would be one day absent for every three weeks):

2250 / 15 = 150
2250 - 150 = 2100

So, you were in school for 2100 days, let's say for 7 hours a day. But, in the real world you usually don't get paid for lunch breaks! So we can knock you down to 6 hours a day. Then let's say your average "salary" for all this time is $6 an hour, because it is higher now but it was lower when you started (the minimum wage used to be much lower).

2100 days X 6 hours = 12,600 hours total
12,600 hours X $6 = $75,600

Someone owes you a lot of money!

THE EDUCATION BUSINESS

Now you are enrolled in online courses. Some groups that provide these courses are for-profit organizations, meaning that they take the money that you or your school pays for the class and use it to grow their organization, all the while trying to return a profit to investors, or people that pay money to a business in hopes that it will grow. Other course providers are non-profit, meaning they can't attract income-seeking investors (like by selling stock). Here is some more information on corporations and organizations. Both types of organizations are trying to "make money" and they both pay all of their employees competitive salaries. However, non-profits don't make money for other people (the investors) and they receive certain tax breaks because of this. For-profits do a lot of the same work that non-profits do, and they have a much bigger risk. So neither organization is "right" or "wrong" or "good" or "bad." They all have to compete against one another and try to offer good products for their market.

For example, can you tell if your online course provider is run by a for-profit or a non-profit? Bet you can't.

Below are some links for further reading, and hopefully you'll remember the true value of school next time you're working on your homework!

Josh

Here is an article from the New York Times about students taking classes online.

If you want to read about funding of online learning click here...

...And if you want to read why "scientists are calling for the federal government to spend millions of dollars on developing video-game applications for schools" then click here.

Finally, here is a list of Digital Learning Commons resources on internet education.

Josh
DLC Student Mentor

Posted by Josh at October 20, 2006 02:36 PM in .